Could J.J. Abrams Bring Half-Life and Portal to the Screen?

Feature film versions of Valve’s Half-Life and Portal video games may be on the way in the not-too-distant future. Polygon reports that Valve’s managing director Gabe Newell joined filmmaker J.J. Abrams on stage at today’s DICE Summit and the pair hinted that a creative team-up is underway.

“There’s an idea we have for a game that we’d like to work with Valve on,” said Abrams.

“We’re super excited about that,” Newell responded, “and we also want to talk about making movies, either a ‘Portal’ movie or a ‘Half-Life’ movie… What we are actually doing here, we are recapitulating a series of conversations going on. We reached the point that we decided to do more than talk.”

The first Half-Life game was released in 1998 and follows a theoretical physicist, Gordon Freeman, who opens a dimensional rift between a New Mexico research facility and a world of monsters called Xen.

Portal, meanwhile, is a spinoff of Half-Life released in 2007. In it, a test subject named Chell is forced to navigate a rival research company’s laboratories armed with a device that can open portals through space. The game was the subject of a 2011 short fan film by Dan Trachtenberg (now set to direct New Line Cinema’s Y: The Last Man) that you watch by clicking here.

Although plans for big screen versions of either game are still nascent, check back for details as soon as they become available.